Now while it’s nice to be asked to fulfil these roles it’s not always an easy immediate decision to take, but there’s a couple of reasons I accepted the offer to work for 3 months at Swamp…

1. They do a lot of excellent work and the projects I’ve worked on in the past with them have always been genuinely interesting and challenging.
2. My second baby is due to be born around mid April, so having guaranteed work up until the day that he/she pops his/her head out into this wonderful world means I can have a good month off afterwards and make the most of the being a new Dad for the second time.

Had the offer been from someone else or I hadn’t been in the same situation I probably would have said “Thanks, but not thanks”.

“But why?” I hear you ask - surely in these times it’d be daft to turn down guaranteed work? Yes, it probably would, but if I was that bothered about guaranteed work or not willing to take some risks I wouldn’t have gone freelance at all.

Going freelance in the first place for me was i) all about getting to spend much more time with my growing family (My little girl had just been born and if I’d still been working in my old place I wouldn’t get to see her half as much as I do now - and that would be a terrible, terrible thing, because there’s nothing more important than spending time my girl),  ii) to work on lots of different jobs for different people  and iii) not having to do do amends to the same old sites I’d been looking at and working on for the couple of years prior. Yeah, the job security was comforting and people I worked with were ace, but the projects were no longer inspiring me and I wanted new challenges. My wife likes it too, the fact I work at home more. And I’m pretty sure the dog’s happy about it too.

All in all I think I’m safe in taking on a 3 month contract - there shouldn’t be too many cobwebs settling while I’m there and it’ll be nice to be part of a studio for a while again. But then come B-Day II, I can shed the shackles of the office once again, safe in the knowledge I’ve built up enough security to have some time off and that there’ll be something else around the corner soon enough.

I’m not entirely sure what the point if this post was really. I think it’s just my way of saying…

ever expanding family + graphic design freelancing career = very good.

As a little bonus for me it has the ability to show the PageRank of whatever page you’re looking at. PageRank is the importance google assigns to a web page (0/10 been the lowest PR, 10/10 being the highest) based on how many other sites link to or reference that page. It gets a lot more complex than that and you can read about it and look at a horrible-and-not-very-helpful diagram here.

Anyway, I noticed the PageRank of the home page of this site, tmrw.co.uk, has gone up from 2/10 to 3/10. I know, not that significant at all, but it shows that I’m doing something right with all the little SEO bits and pieces I’m trying. As far as I can tell the better your PageRank the better your chances are of turning up on the front page of the google search results.

I put it down mainly to the fact that I’ve started leaving comments on other peoples blog posts. In the past I just read something then skipped onto something else, but now if I read something useful or interesting or download something off someones site, I usually leave a comment which in turn leaves a little hyperlink back to my site.

It looks like this site needs all the PR it can get at the moment too. I don’t know what I did or exactly when it happened, but despite my little PageRank boost Google doesn’t seem to like me any more.

It used to be that you searched for Freelance Design Leeds or Freelance Web Design Leeds and I came up on the first page for each one - not at the top by any means but I did OK. Now (Jan 2009) I’m currently back on page 10! Not good for generating new business, and the one thing a freelancer like me really needs to do is generate new business.

Ah well. I put this HUGE drop down the results table down to the fact I’ve been re-jigging the content and categorisation of this site/blog, and it’s confused google into thinking I’ve got a lot of duplicate content or something like that. I guess it’s just a case of waiting again and hoping I creep back up, page by page until I’m back up near the top again.

It’s not all bad though, have a search for freelance 3d design Leeds and I come second which is great. But to be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a term people search for a lot anyway.

A little motion graphics piece I did for Swamp@Brahm to illustrate the new features of the latest Yorkshire Water website.

The concept for the piece was by the creative guys and girls at Swamp, but they left it up to me to interpret their brief and this is how it turned out.

The whole thing was created layer by layer in After Effects, using the 3D layers and camera. Most of the mouse cursor movement etc is animated within AE, only a couple of bits are actual screen captures of the new site as it wasn’t live at the time we made this.

Hopefully, it will help other AS/Gaia novices get their head around a few things and give people a kick in the right direction.

View Demo

Here it is: http://www.tmrw.co.uk/demo/gaia-framework/

Source Files

Download it all here: http://www.tmrw.co.uk/demo/gaia-framework/gaia-as3-demo.zip

Dependencies

You’ll need the Gaia Flash Framework extension installed, you can download that from here.

Notes about the demo

1. This particular demo is built on Gaia v2.4.9 - the AS3 version
2. The site this demo is based on (designbygrain.com) was my very first AS3 site, I’m not a programmer and I’m not promising my code is as organised or tidy as is should be, but hopefully someone out there will find it useful!

Background

The first site I had the opportunity to use the Gaia Flash Framework on was designbygrain.com. The framework made it easy for me, an ActionScript novice, to create what I hope is a high quality section/page based site.

Not only was Gaia useful, but the community on the forums was ace at helping out and suggesting solutions to any problems I had, and Steven Sacks deserves a lot of credit for all his work in getting the Gaia Framework to the solid, helpful Adobe Flash extension it is today.

What is the Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash?

For those of you who don’t know what the Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash is, best just take a look at the website (www.gaiaflashframework.com), but in brief author of it, Steven Sacks, describes it as…

Gaia is an open-source front-end Flash Framework for AS3 and AS2 designed to dramatically reduce development time.

• Revolutionary scaffolding engine builds fully functional Flash sites in less than 10 minutes!
• Simple API for Navigation, Transitions, Preloading, Asset Management makes development a snap!
• Deep Linking achieved through seamless integration with SWFAddress
• SEO Scaffolding makes Search Engine Optimization as easy as pressing a button
• Easy enough for novices
• Powerful enough for experts

Ripe needed a strong 3D visual creating for a spread in a brochure for Media City - a close-up of a circuit board with the Media City logo incorporated onto it somehow.

Work In Progress Renders…

Because the job was only a quicky, the geometry needed to be kept pretty simple…

So most, if not all, of the actual detail on the PCB etc had to come from believable textures.

The original render looked like this…

…which was a little harsh and a bit too busy, but after a little post process colour grading and Lens-Blur/depth-of-field in PhotoShop, the final render looked fine for what Ripe needed.

I’ve completely made the theme my own and written the css from scratch - that was just quick hack to get things going, based on a free theme I’d found called Yelloh) and I’ve added some newer bits of work, with more to come.

Enjoy!

Anyway, last weekend I bought myself a new toy, a shiny new Kona Blast 08 mountain bike…

According to the reviews, an awesome bike for the price which I wholeheartedly intend to ride at breakneck speeds down long, steep mountains trails while jumping over streams and hopping over logs as big as cars, just like on Kickstart, but without the engines or necessary skill.

Due to a mix-up at Evans Cycles I ended up with a 19″ bike which was way too big for me so I had to wait a week to take it back and get a 17″ which is, I’m happy to report, a perfect fit. I picked the 17″ up this weekend and and went for my first bicycle ride in probably 15 years, and probably the first bit of real exercise I’ve done in all that time too. My legs (and back, arms, head and hands) ache but I know that one day, soon hopefully, I will feel the benefit.

The plan is to ride every evening and weekend and generally spend time having fun doing something other than looking at a monitor and moving a mouse around my desk. So far, so good - except the weather, which seems to start raining each time I even think about going outside.

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

• To make it easier to keep up-to-date
• Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
  
• And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) - To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

I’m a freelance graphic designer, so it’s all about getting work any way I can, and while doing work for design agency’s in and around Leeds is great, I’d ultimately like to get more work directly and establish my own client base, turning me and my little freelance operation into something larger.

The Task

Currently if I search for something like web design in Leeds, web design Leeds, or 3D visualisation Yorkshire, I’m not coming anywhere near the top of the list - and that’s a bad thing.

Typically a prospective client will search for something and go for the top few links, then maybe scan the first page of results to see if anything else catches their eye.

So, now that I have a decent up-datable site, the goal is to get my site ranked highly for search terms that I think people who need freelance design services like the ones I provide will actually type into Google.

How

From been a web designer for the last 7 years I (hopefully) know enough to make a start on getting my site ranked much higher than it currently is. The main things to concentrate on are…

• Work out what search terms you actually want to appear for at the top of the list.
• Relevant good content is key to it all - write good content to the subject you’d like to rank highly for and the visitors will, in time, start coming.
• So, if I want want my site to start ranking highly for terms like freelance web design Leeds or freelance photography Leeds then I need to actually use those phrases or variations on them (it’s almost as if this whole article is just part of my plan) on my site - although not excessively else you’ll get ranked down for trying to spam your way to the top of the list.
• Write good content in this blog section of my site so that people link to it (don’t worry, I’m not under any illusions this is good content just yet - I can design and take photos but I tend to waffle on a bit instead of getting to the point when writing - maybe I’ll write a novel one day, can’t be that hard can it?) and just generally try to get people linking to me site.  The more people Google sees linking to me, the higher the ‘authority’ it’ll give my site, and will therefore hopefully show my site above someone elses, who has for example exactly the same content but a lower authority according to their ranking system. This, and it’s a dark art in it’s self, is called Page Rank.
• Make sure the Titles of my pages contain some useful keywords and phrases (but not a list of keywords like the Meta tag - see below), but still remain descriptive and readable for the user.
• Meta keywords, as far as I can tell, are pretty much ignored by Google and a lot of other search engines these days. While it’s still good to have them the engines these days take a much closer look at the actual content of the pages to index them and, not the Meta tags. Instead of making sure you’ve got a nice list of Meta Keywords, make sure you use all the key-words and key-phrases you want to get indexed for in the content of your site instead, like 3D design in Leeds. See, easy. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
• Be patient, wait for the major search engines to get a good index of your site, and don’t be afraid to change content if the old stuff’s not working

I’ll be keeping this post updated with whatever genuinely useful information I find on this subject but for now I’m just going keep on updating my site, tweaking the keyword content here and there for each of the work pages etc, and keep an eye on my ranking. I’ll let you know if anything starts shifting.

That’s just because I’ve transferred the content from that really simple flat HTML portfolio site over into a WordPress based site, so I’ve got a nice simple CMS I can easily keep up-to-date - something I was struggling to find time to do with the old site.

So keep your eyes peeled and expect some design changes as I work get a real site design together - what you see now is just a reasonably tidy skeleton of a site so the search engines can work their magic.